Inventory design and a Cave painting

In the image above you can see a section of the Cave. On the left side is the Ore that you come here, primarily to mine. I have about finished the whole Cave1 system now and am working on refining the environment and adding cool touches where I see them needed. I think it is quite atmospheric, though I have still to find the right music for this scene.


When playing the game itself lately I have become a little displeased with the Inventory system that you use. It isn't really bad, but it has a few shortcomings and so in a recent design discussion with Leilani we came up with several touches that should improve it's usability. For example... where the cursor is when you bring up the inventory, is exactly where you left it, no more resetting to the top corner. Also the cursor now wraps on the horizontal, meaning you can get to the furthest item real fast! Along with this was the fact we have added in sooooo many more items for you to carry than the original design called for, so we wanted to address that too.

We decided we needed to show more inventory items at a time.....

We were only displaying 5 items on the horizontal lines, and so adding more items should be easy right? In the above image you can see that I went all out and made it 9 in the line. However we really felt this was a bit crowded. I also wonder how people might fair on the touch screen tablets. So 9 was too many... ok then....

So then we tried 8, which was still too crowded. finally I ended up on 7 and felt OK about it. Leilani confirmed and so I made it so in the code. Now I feel that using the inventory is not bad, not bad at all. Still the best feature was adding in the fact that the cursor did not reset when the inventory was displayed.

The reason the cursor was reset is due to the fact that the Traders also used your inventory display and code. Well as it happens I do not think this inventory display really suits the Traders. So after a brief discussion and design session we came up with a totally new layout for Traders to display their wares. I have just started on it and will report on that in a future post :)

Lastly I want to mention that Unity really lets me down badly when using large Enums in the Editor. they display in a linear fashion and it is very cumbersome. So a few days ago I spent 5 bucks on an editor asset that fixes this issue by adding a search box and a vertical scroll bar. I think this is going to be 5 bucks well spent. Otter Menus.

Laters
Da Voodoochief